“Audiences rarely see five saxophones onstage at a classical music concert, but there they were Sunday afternoon at the Lesher Center, as music director Donato Cabrera led the California Symphony in the original 1924 jazz band version of George Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ with the young, fast-rising pianist Charlie Albright as soloist,” writes Georgia Rowe in Monday’s (1/25) San Jose Mercury News (California). The saxophones “played essential parts in Gershwin’s great American score, and in … jazz-inspired pieces by Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, Leonard Bernstein and Kurt Weill [Scherzo a la Russe; La création du monde; Prelude, Fugue and Riffs; Little Threepenny Music Suite]. “Conventional wisdom tells us that jazz and classical works occupy discrete musical spheres. But there was a great deal of overlap throughout the 20th century, as Cabrera demonstrated with great enthusiasm…. Each work showed the ways that these composers … admired, and were inspired by, the music of the Jazz Age. Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody’ … was the main event, and Cabrera led a dynamic reading…. Albright … dispatched his assignment with fervent emphasis and a mercurial touch. There were plenty of fireworks, too—the pianist’s encores were Mozart’s ‘Turkish March,’ capped by another American classic, ‘Great Balls of Fire.’ ”
Posted January 26, 2016
